[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 39 (Monday, October 2, 2000)]
[Pages 2254-2256]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks on the Children's Health Insurance Program

September 29, 2000

    Thank you very much. Thank you. Good morning. Thank you, Debbie. She 
did a good job, didn't she? Let's give her another hand. [Applause] 
Thank you. I would also like to ask the rest of her family to stand: her 
husband, Chris; and her son, Brian; her daughter, Melissa. Let's give 
them a big hand there. [Applause] There they are. Thank you for being 
here.
    I also want to thank the advocates, whom Secretary Shalala 
mentioned, and three elected officials who have strongly, strongly 
supported our efforts. First, in the Congress, Representative Sandy 
Levin and Representative Robert Underwood, thank you for your help. And 
Linda Cropp from the DC City Council, thank you for being here.
    Let me announce, before I get to the subject at hand, that I just 
signed the continuing resolution which Congress sent me yesterday, 
necessary because our fiscal year ends tomorrow and we have to have a 
stopgap funding measure for the Government to run. But I hope we can now 
pass the remaining appropriations bills. September has come and gone, 
and Congress still has obligations to fulfill.
    These children behind me have been back in school for a month, but 
we still don't have the first assignment turned in from Congress, 
ensuring that our schools have the resources to meet the high standards 
we expect of them.
    Now, let's get back to this story. Deborah's story is all too common 
in America. There are millions of our fellow citizens, like her and her 
husband, who get up every day, go to work, play by the rules, and still 
have a tough time finding affordable health insurance.
    For 8 years now, Secretary Shalala and Hillary--who I wish could be 
here today for this happy announcement--and I have worked as hard as we 
could to make sure families get more health insurance. Yesterday we had 
more evidence that our approach is working. The census data shows that 
the number of uninsured Americans fell by 1.7 million in 1999, the first 
major drop in a dozen years.
    Nearly two-thirds of these newly insured are children, like many of 
those who are here with us today. Since I signed the CHIP program into 
law, 2.5 million children have been able to get insurance through this 
program. In our budget, Vice President Gore and I have proposed a family 
care initiative, which would take care of the second part of Debbie's 
statement. It would expand CHIP to cover the parents of eligible 
children.
    If we do this, we could cover a quarter of all the uninsured 
children and families in America and, I might add, those that are most 
at risk and need the health insurance most. Parents like Deborah and 
Chris Bredbenner know what a difference health insurance can make--you 
just heard it--not just in emergencies but for routine care.

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    Consider the child who doesn't get treated for an ear infection, who 
might suffer permanent hearing loss and, certainly, while in pain, would 
have a harder time learning in school. Consider the toll of untreated 
asthma, which will cause American students, listen to this, to miss 10 
million school days this year alone.
    That's why we need to keep pushing forward until all our children 
are covered. To help accomplish this, the Department of Health and Human 
Services is awarding $700,000 in grants today, to develop new and even 
more effective ways to identify and to enroll uninsured children. These 
grants will be used not only to get children enrolled but to keep them 
enrolled, so they can get the care they need. They will build on our 
recent success in improving outreach and enrollment around America.
    If you look at how the States are doing with CHIP, you'll see that 
those with the best outreach programs have the most success in boosting 
the number of children covered. States like Indiana, Ohio, and Maine 
have done a remarkable job. I hope others will look to them for 
leadership.
    There was a story in one of our major papers yesterday, outlining 
the dramatic differences in enrollments from State to State, and making 
it clear that the States that had the most systematic, determined effort 
and a strong leader, got kids enrolled, and those that didn't try as 
hard, didn't. This is a simple matter of systematic effort and real 
dedication.
    I also hope that every working parent searching for children's 
health insurance will call the toll free number on everyone of these 
children's T-shirts: 1-877-KIDS-NOW.
    We need to remember that the rising number of uninsured didn't 
develop overnight; it won't disappear overnight. In some ways, it 
reminds me of the challenges we faced when Vice President Gore and I 
took office in January of 1993. Some people said there was nothing we 
could do to stop the rising tide of red ink. The numbers on the national 
debt clock in New York were flashing so fast, people's eyes were glazing 
over.
    But we made some tough choices: we cut some spending; we raised some 
money; we invested in the American people and eliminated hundreds of 
programs we didn't need and together, we turned a $290 billion annual 
deficit into $230 billion of surplus this year. That didn't happen by 
chance. It happened by choice. That's what is happening now with health 
coverage. If we make the right decisions, if we make smart choices and 
see them through, we can reduce the number of uninsured people in 
America.
    First, as I said, it's very important to recognize that the laws on 
the books, we believe, would enable us to ensure up to two-thirds of the 
uninsured children in America--8 of the 12 million--if every State did 
everything possible to enroll children in the CHIP program and got those 
who are Medicaid-
eligible into Medicaid.
    Second, we ought to expand CHIP eligibility to the parents of these 
children. It's very important.
    Third, we ought to focus on another group of people that are having 
great difficulty getting health care, those who are over 55, but not 65, 
therefore are not old enough for Medicare, and many of them have taken 
early retirement or lost their jobs, or they're working in a place where 
the employer doesn't offer health insurance coverage.
    We think they ought to be able to buy into Medicare, not to weaken 
the Medicare program. Our proposal is, give them a tax credit to defray 
some of the cost of buying into Medicare, so that we would, in effect, 
cut the cost for them of buying into Medicare but get the whole amount 
of money into Medicare, so that it would in no way, shape, or form 
weaken the financial stability of Medicare. This is very, very 
important.
    And I might say to you, we ought to do this now, because this group 
is only going to get larger as the baby boomers age. Next year, exhibit 
A--[laughter]--the oldest of the baby boomers will be 55. For 28 years 
after that, you will have some portion of the baby boom generation in 
that 55- to 65-year-old age group. It's very, very important that we do 
this.
    Next, Congress should pass our tax credit for small business, to 
strengthen their hand in negotiating quality affordable health insurance 
options for their employees. A lot of businesses try to offer health 
insurance, but as you just heard Debbie say, the cost to

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them is so high, and they have to pass so much of the cost on to their 
employees, that many of the employees can't afford it, even if it's 
offered.
    Next, Congress should restore Medicaid benefits to the most 
vulnerable of our legal immigrants, including children. A few days ago, 
a bipartisan coalition on the House Commerce Committee voted to pass 
this important measure, and I applaud them for doing so. Surely now that 
the committee has supported it, we can work together to restore these 
benefits and do it this year.
    Finally, there are some other items on our agenda. The American 
people still need Congress to pass a Medicare prescription drug benefit, 
a $3,000 tax credit for long-term care, very important for families that 
are caring for family members who are disabled or aging, who have long-
term care needs, and a strong Patients' Bill of Rights.
    When Hillary and Donna and I started working on this back in 1993, 
we proposed a solution that would have covered all Americans, would have 
the Patients' Bill of Rights, would have the provisions of the Kennedy-
Kassebaum bill, would take care of children who age out of foster care. 
And it was too much for the system to accommodate at once, so we've gone 
back, piece-by-piece, trying to achieve that.
    We have now the children's health insurance coverage. We've taken 
care of the kids that age out of foster care. We passed a bill that 
protects you if you get sick or if you change jobs from losing your 
health insurance. But we need for people to make maximum use of this 
law. Every child in this country, like the children standing here and 
like the Bredbenner kids, who is eligible for CHIP, ought to be in it. 
The parents who need it, ought to be able to buy into the program. We 
can afford this now. It's quite manageable. And we absolutely know there 
are only two ways that you can provide health insurance for working 
people on modest incomes. There either has to be some sort of subsidy 
from the Government, or the employers have to provide it, or you have to 
have a combination of both. Next, we need to deal with the 55- to 65-
year-old age group. And finally, we need to deal with the fact that 
there are so many of our seniors who don't have prescription drug 
coverage. And we need to deal with the long-term care challenge facing 
our country. And we need to pass this Patients' Bill of Rights that 
we've been working on since 1994. This is all very, very important.
    The good news is, we know this approach will work. We know that the 
number of uninsured is going down, and I might say, we don't have the 
figures yet, but we know there are several hundred thousand children 
who, because of the CHIP program, have been enrolled in Medicaid.
    So we just have to keep working on this. So I implore you to make 
sure every State in this country is making the most of the laws that are 
here and to do everything you can to get Congress, in this time of 
unprecedented prosperity, that enables us to do things--we could not do 
this 6 years ago, because we did not have the money. We now have a 
surplus. We can do this. We still have a reasonably sized tax cut to 
help people with education and child care and saving for retirement and 
pay this country out of debt in 2012. We have the money to keep 
America's economy going, to get the country out of debt, and to provide 
more health insurance to families like those that are represented by 
these children here today. We ought to do it and do it now.
    Thank you very much, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 11 a.m. in the Rose Garden at the White 
House. In his remarks, he referred to Debbie Bredbenner, whose two 
children are covered by the Children's Health Insurance Program but who 
could not afford health insurance for herself.